tools/build/ops2c.pl: Can it be removed?

[James E Keenan]

Since the #parrot theme of the week is to close Trac tickets, I took a 
fresh look at http://trac.parrot.org/parrot/ticket/677.

Here is a list of tools/build/*.pl files found in the output of 'make':

[li11-226:parrot] 531 $ grep -n 'tools/build' 
~/learn/parrot/make.output/20100820.48587.parrot.txt | cut -d ' ' -f2 | 
sort | uniq -c
     117 tools/build/c2str.pl
      31 tools/build/h2inc.pl
       2 tools/build/parrot_config_c.pl
       1 tools/build/pbcversion_h.pl
     192 tools/build/pmc2c.pl
       1 tools/build/vtable_extend.pl
       1 tools/build/vtable_h.pl
(7 total)

Now here is a list of all the Perl 5 programs in tools/build/:

[li11-226:parrot] 532 $ ls tools/build/*.pl |cat
tools/build/addopstags.pl
tools/build/c2str.pl
tools/build/fixup_gen_file.pl
tools/build/h2inc.pl
tools/build/headerizer.pl
tools/build/ops2c.pl
tools/build/parrot_config_c.pl
tools/build/pbcversion_h.pl
tools/build/pmc2c.pl
tools/build/vtable_extend.pl
tools/build/vtable_h.pl
(11 total)

11 - 7 = 4 ... and one of the 4 *not* invoked by 'make all' really stood 
out for me:  tools/build/ops2c.pl.  (That's because I was involved in a 
major refactoring of this in early 2007.  But since that time it's been 
replaced by (I think) an NQP thingee.)

Peering in to tools/build/ops2c.pl, I see:

# $Id: ops2c.pl 46938 2010-05-24 03:29:22Z bacek $
...

warn 'ops2c.pl is deprecated. Use ops2c$(EXE) instead';
# Ignore "core"
shift @ARGV;
my $ops2c = File::Spec->catfile($PConfig{bindir}, 'ops2c');
exec $ops2c, @ARGV;

And this was the last commit of this file to trunk.  I didn't see any 
mention of this deprecation in DEPRECATED.pod (but, then again, such 
notice might have already passed its removal date).

In any event, is there any reason why 'ops2c.pl' cannot be removed 
outright at this time?  (From my earlier work on this file, I don't 
recall its ever being invoked outside the context of 'make'.)

bacek, can you comment?

Thank you very much.

kid51